Here’s my piece from yesterday’s Front Page Magazine.
Left-Wing Terrorist Brett Kimberlin Gets Conservative Blogger Jailed
By Matthew Vadum
Something is rotten in the State of Maryland.
Convicted terrorist bomber and perjurer Brett Kimberlin is free while one of his many harassment victims remains under a judicial gag order for the crime of writing about Kimberlin’s violent criminal history. It’s a bizarre situation, as I reported on “The Source” TV show with Ezra Levant.
Kimberlin and his cadre of cyber-stalkers try to bully conservative bloggers into silence. They post personal information and home addresses of their targets to send the message that “we know where you live.”
The extraordinarily litigious former federal prisoner does not tolerate being discussed unfavorably on the Internet. He typically files lawsuits against bloggers who dare to bring up his lengthy criminal record and antisocial behavior and seeks injunctions to shut them up. He is a ruthless, relentless bully.
But help is on the way.
As various Kimberlin detractors including CNN contributor Erick Erickson have found themselves “SWAT-ted” after writing blog posts about the infamous “Speedway Bomber,” ABC News reports that Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) is now demanding that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate. SWAT-ting consists of tricking 911 operators into dispatching emergency response teams to a targeted person’s home. It’s a nasty prank that could easily get a victim killed.
“Any potentially criminal action that incites fear, seeks to silence a dissenting opinion, and collaterally wastes the resources of law enforcement should be given close scrutiny at all levels,” Chambliss said in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. “Regardless of any potential political differences that may exist, threats and intimidation have no place in our national political discourse. Those who choose to enter into that political discourse should not have to worry about potential threats to their or their family’s safety.”
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a public interest law firm, has agreed to represent Ali A. Akbar, head of the National Bloggers Club. Both Akbar and the club have been targeted by the “Breitbart Unmasked” website which appears to be linked to Kimberlin and his associates.
The National Bloggers Club separately yesterday announced it plans to raise funds for the appeal of Aaron Walker who was recently jailed for daring to blog about Kimberlin. Ignoring the First Amendment and binding legal precedents, Montgomery County, Maryland Judge Cornelius Vaughey made permanent a temporary injunction stopping Walker from blogging about Kimberlin. Walker didn’t write anything untrue about Kimberlin but Judge Vaughey didn’t care.
Forget about the Brandenburg standard articulated by the Supreme Court and “let’s go by Vaughey right now, and common sense out in the world. But you know, where I grew up in Brooklyn, when that stuff was pulled, it was settled real quickly,” the superannuated judge said, according to a transcript.
Rambling, Vaughey continued,
“Very quickly. And I’m not going to talk about those ways, but boy, it ended fast. I even can tell you, when I grew up in my community, you wanted to date an Italian girl, you had to get the Italian boy’s permission. But that was the old neighborhoods back in the city. And it was really fair. When someone did something up there to you, your sister, your girlfriend, you got some friends to take them for a ride in the back of the truck. […] That ended it. You guys have got this new mechanical stuff out here, the electronic stuff, that you can just ruin somebody without doing anything. But you started it.”
You get the drift. Vaughey’s ruling against Walker is an outrage that cannot be allowed to stand. Walker’s cause is the cause of everyone in America who has a vested interest in free speech – in other words, everyone. If Walker had been a liberal you know the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights would have tripped over each other in the race to represent him in court and there would be no need to seek donations for his legal fund.
But how did Walker get into the situation in the first place? He wrote blog posts critical of Kimberlin, a practitioner of “lawfare.” Lawfare, a portmanteau of the words law and warfare, in Kimberlin’s case consists of abusing the legal system in order to financially cripple an enemy or monopolize his time so he cannot advance a cause he supports. Walker, himself a lawyer, wrote nothing about Kimberlin that was false or even remotely defamatory.
Kimberlin doesn’t care. He brags about filing more than 100 lawsuits. He enjoys intimidating people on the other side of the political spectrum. It’s what he does.
The reportedly brilliant and well-connected Kimberlin co-founded the Justice Through Music Project, a shady 501c3 nonprofit in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and a shrill watchdog group called Velvet Revolution. Both groups buy into the radical environmentalist agenda and support the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have received funding from the George Soros-financed Tides Foundation and to a lesser extent from the philanthropies of Teresa Heinz Kerry and Barbra Streisand.
His wealthy left-wing aunt, Harriet Crosby, may also have steered money to the groups. She’s one of the original activist-donors involved in the Threshold Foundation which has given money to both of Kimberlin’s groups.
Kimberlin is a political trailblazer of sorts. He is a tactical innovator whose “lawfare” methods would have impressed the father of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky. The late conservative Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart recognized Kimberlin’s unique talents last fall, tweeting that the convicted terrorist and his confederates needed “exposure.”
The Left has long supported using terror to cow its opponents.
As I reported in my book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN founder Wade Rathke supports cyber-terrorism.
Rathke, who now runs ACORN International (also known as Community Organizations International), is in favor of computer hacking as long as it helps the labor movement.
Crazy, computer viruses are started by young kids around the world or hackers bored out of their skulls that live right down the street. As union organizers we are still doing 8 point difficulty dumpster dives for alpha lists of employees, when theoretically some good geeks could tap in, load up, and download the whole thing and throw it over our transom window. What a waste of talent when such a huge contribution could be made to the labor movement.
“Simply put, why isn’t there more ‘monkey wrenching’ in our world? Where is our Earth First!” he wrote in an infamous column. Monkey-wrenching is a form of eco-terrorism or ecotage (eco-sabotage) that consists of harming the economic interests of those who are perceived threats to the environment.
Was Kimberlin inspired by Rathke and the in-your-face tactics of ACORN?
Maybe.